Convert Pepperwell Fonts

By Matthew Ford

Have you ever wanted to produce a more interesting screen display by using different letter styles?

There are several ways in which you can. One way is by installing a ROM containing a font, e.g. CHARROM which contains twelve new fonts. Another way is to create your own fonts by using one of the font designers available.

There are several font designers available through the PD libraries that do the job very well, two of these being:

BOOFONT Font Designer, and
Andrew Pepperell's Font Designer.

Both of these designers work on the BBC but only BOOFONT also works on the Electron.

Once a new font has been created and saved to disk, the code has to be converted for it to be useable. As the code for each character was saved, the individual parts were joined together to form one string of 24 bytes:

If the character is defined as above then the saved character string is:
015009018018060036072072

The conversion program supplied on this disk (Filename: CONVER1) takes the saved file as named in line 20 and the name of the coverted file in line 30. The conversion takes about 45 seconds and once converted, the font file can be *RUNned. Once the new font is installed in memory, it stays until BREAK is pressed.

If you wish to use new fonts on the Electron, extra memory has to be set aside for the character defintions. So to properly install the new font, type the following:

>*FX20,6 (RETURN)
>*RUN fontname (RETURN)
>PAGE=&1900 (RETURN)

If you choose to use Andrew Pepperell's font designer, the output produced is of a different form and because of this a different conversion method is needed. The program CONVER2 is for use with this designer and when converted, the font can be used as before.